Dream about WW2 in Italy

Here's another dream, but one from a long time back.  I was in high school or maybe even middle school when I had this dream, but it was striking enough for me to remember through the years.

In my dream, I was an American soldier fighting in Italy somewhere just south of Rome in World War II.  In this case, we were clearing a building of German soldiers, who were mostly refusing to surrender.  It was dangerous, but the Germans in this building were clerks, not fighters, and they had pistols in contrast with our rifles, so we had a distinct advantage.  I remember the deeply recessed doorways of the building -- both sides used them for cover.

Suddenly, another German popped around the corner, only this time it was not a man, but a lovely blonde woman in an army auxiliary uniform.  What happened in the seconds immediately after she came into view was a little blurry -- I think that I dreamed and re-dreamed that sequence until I found a successful compromise between my upbringing, which strongly emphasized that no real man hurts a woman, and my desire for self preservation.  After all, she did have a pistol!  The resolution was that I shot her in the shoulder, a nonlethal wound that forced her to drop the pistol.

She also had with her a sort of document box.  This was a box about a foot square and about 4 inches high that would be used to secure important documents; if anyone tried opening it without knowing the trick, it would explode, destroying both the documents and the person opening it.  This was something we were looking for, and in the dream I suspected it contained details of the movements of German tanks being brought up from Yugoslavia to reinforce their positions in Italy.  (Yes, this was a very detailed dream.)  I took the box from her, and she was led away to have her wound treated and to be processed with the other prisoners.

I took the box to headquarters, which in the dream was ridiculously close to the front -- apparently in the next building, actually.  There I found the general who was (at least theoretically) in command of the operation, along with my colonel.  The general was useless, though; he was preparing for some sort of confirmation hearing for his appointment to a position in the OSS, and his mind was entirely on that hearing.  As a result, the man effectively in charge was my colonel, who, as further events would show, was a complete idiot.

The colonel examined the box, and he noticed that the lid was held on by something like a tie strap fastener; it was designed so that once inserted, it could not be pulled out.  "You see how they don't want us to pull this out?  That's just what we're gonna do," he announced. 

This sounded like a terrible idea to me -- simply applying brute force to a box that we knew was booby-trapped.  I suggested that maybe the woman who had been captured in possession of the box would know how to open it, but he would have nothing of it, telling me (in words I can never forget), "Do you think I got all this rank without knowing how to defuse a Nazzy bomb?"

When I heard that and knew he was just about to force it, I turned around and started running.  I had just made it outside the building when the charges went off.  Then I woke up.

10 Years for Changing Tags

Do other people have dreams like this?

Last night I dreamed that I was trying to work two jobs with the federal government at the same time.  This was not really allowed, so I (sort of) disguised myself, only so superficially that I thought it would keep me out of trouble if I were caught.  I didn't change my name, but I wore different (though identical) pairs of blue jeans to the two jobs.  As in the real world, I had two checkbooks (from when I had both a bank account and a credit union account); both have brown leather covers, but I took one to one job and the other to the other job. Most importantly, I used the same parking permit, which was associated with my car tag, but I drove one car to one job, then changed the tag and permit over to my other vehicle and drove to the second job.

I was caught, and what really got me into trouble was taking the tag off one car and putting it on the other.  I was sentenced to 10 years in prison for that.

Of course, it's a good feeling to wake up from such a dream.

By the way, I don't work for the federal government at all, nor do I own two vehicles.

I think this must have been in part due to watching "Accident Investigator" on Hulu. The scary thing about that show is that I know I could have been involved in many of these incidents had the circumstances been different.  All it takes is a moment of carelessness, or a bit of bad luck.

UPDATE:  "Accident Investigator" may have gotten me into the frame of mind where I was thinking, "Donnerwetter!  This could happen to me!" but I now remember that in Episode 16 ("The Secret War") of "Soviet Storm:  WW2 in the East" there was a courier who worked for the Swedish government who changed the tag on his bicycle when he was visiting his Soviet handlers.  Clearly some of the details influenced my dream.

Have You Ever Died in a Dream?

A blog posting by Simcha Fisher got me thinking about this.

Of course, everyone has heard the old saw that if you die in a dream, you die in real life.  The thing is, I actually did die in a dream; I was fighting in Italy in World War II, and I was killed by a hand grenade.  I woke up just after dying, not just before.  I don't really remember anything else from that dream, though.


Interestingly enough, though, I had another WW2 in Italy dream that I remember in much more detail.
  

We were fighting in a city just a little south of Rome, and had made it into a building that the German army was using as a local headquarters.  The building had long halls, and the rooms off the halls had deeply recessed doorways, which both the Germans and we used for cover.  However, most of the Germans in this building were little more than clerks with side arms, and we made pretty short work of them. 

Then, from around a corner, came a pretty blond young woman, wearing the feldgrau uniform of the German army and carrying a pistol in her left hand (she seemed to be left-handed) and a box in her right hand.  (It was quite significant to me that she was in the German army, not the SS.) 

At this point, the dream got sort of fuzzy.  I'm pretty sure that I dreamed and re-dreamed the next few seconds until I got an acceptable outcome, because on the one hand my upbringing really ingrained into me not to hurt a woman, but on the other hand she had a gun.  My shot hit her in the shoulder, and she had to drop her pistol.

I took her in custody back to our headquarters, which were unrealistically nearby.  She was taken away to be processed as a POW, but I knew the box was probably important.  It was about one foot square and six inches high, with a fastener through the center.  In the dream I knew that this was a message box, designed to protect important papers; once it was locked, anyone opening it the wrong way would set off explosive charges, destroying both the papers and the person trying to get to them.  I strongly suspected that this was what we were looking for:  information about tanks in Yugoslavia that were being brought up to support German positions in Italy.

Back in our headquarters, though, there was a serious problem.  There was a general in nominal command, but his mind was not in the game; he expected to be given a high position in the OSS and thought of nothing but the politics.  The man effectively in command was both a colonel and an idiot. 

"Now, you see how this thing fastens through the top?  They don't want us to just force it open.  That tells me it's what we should do,"  he said.   

I was unconvinced.  "I don't think so.  Maybe we should send for the girl who was carrying it?  She might know how to get it open." 

"Son," he said, "Do you think I got all this rank without knowing how to defuse a Nazi bomb?"  (He pronounced it "Nazzy".)

When I heard that and saw he was about to pry the lid off, I started running.  I just made it out of the building when the charges blew.

Then I woke up.

Salamanders

Several years ago I had a dream in which there were some unexplained features in the earthquakes associated with a volcano.  We went to where we could look at the churning lava, and at first it looked just like regular convection rolls.  Then, as we continued to watch, it became clear that these were not just convection rolls, they were in fact living beings made of the same materials as the lava itself; they were salamanders.  In fact, in shape they were not unlike the amphibians. 



This discovery made me hugely excited:  here was silicon-based life living inside the Earth.  It would be more biochemically distinct from familiar life than anything we might find on the surface of Mars.

This story reminded me of that dream.  We really know very little about what happens in the deepest depths of the Earth.  We do know, though, that at the core-mantle boundary we have 

• a fluid (liquid iron), that might act as a solvent, 
• a solid surface, 
• interesting chemistry, and
• a flow of energy.

If the chemistry is interesting enough -- and at this point, I think it's safe to say we can't be sure -- these conditions sound like the basic requirements for life. 

Maybe those salamanders really are down there, after all.

Dione

Here's a more typical dream, one with no chance of becoming a story.


I was looking toward sunset and noticed a bright object in the sky near the sun.  I wasn't sure what it was, so I used Stellarium to check on the identity of the object.  It turned out that there were several moons (not of earth, but apparently of Jupiter) in that area, the largest of which by far was the giant moon Dione.


Even in my dream that didn't make much sense to me, and as I drifted back and forth from sleeping-nearly-waking to waking-nearly-sleeping, the following occurred to me in about this order:

• Dione is not really a giant moon.
• It is a moon of Saturn, not Jupiter.
• For such a small object, it is much too far away to be a bright object in our night sky.
• It is probably beyond the diffraction limit of the human eye to resolve Dione from Saturn.

I have no idea what brought this on, but having astronomy in my dreams has been fairly typical since I took an intro astronomy course from the local community college when I was in 10th grade.  

At least this time I realized there was something wrong even when I was in the dream.  What can be more disturbing is when elements from a dream seem to make sense even after waking.

Based on a Dream from January 2012

Back when I was in grad school, we used to do a lot of canoeing. Usually there would be four of us: Sam, who was doing research in the same office as me; Josh, who had an office down the hall; Josh's girlfriend Lisa; and me.

Thursday and Friday there had been rain showers for the first time in about a month. The local creeks and rivers had been low, with sand bars and roots making any canoeing difficult, but by the time the skies cleared on Saturday they had risen, and we had a good time. We canoed about a dozen miles downstream, and sunset was only a half-hour away when we finally pulled out at a bridge. Sam's car had been left at the put-in spot, so Josh and Lisa drove him back to pick it up while I stayed with the canoes.

There wasn't much to do, and after maybe twenty minutes I wandered up the landing to the road to see if I could see anyone coming. It was still too early for the others to be back, though, so I started back down, when I was surprised to notice that someone had pulled off on the other side of the road. It looked like they must have come from an antique car show; both their car and their clothing looked like something out of the 1950's.

There was something about them that seemed wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. The people looked normal enough: two young men and two young women, who might have been their girlfriends or sisters (they all looked vaguely Italian to me), and an older man who may have been one of their fathers. The two women, one of whom was visibly upset, held back near the car with the older man. The two young men had gone down to the creek, where they threw in something small. My uneasy feeling seemed to be strongest about these two. They were doing something else, but I couldn't see or hear very distinctly what that was.

No one had noticed me yet, so I went back down quietly to the canoes. My friends got back a few minutes later, and before long we had the canoes packed away and were headed off to find something to eat. As we pulled out, I noticed that the “Italians” were gone. Also, even though our cars were leaving ruts in the muddy ground, there were no such ruts on the other side of the road.

I didn't think about the “Italians” again until several days later, when an errand took me out of town and I came back around dusk by the same road. I was surprised to see they were pulled off at the side of the bridge again. I slowed down in case they were having car trouble, but as I got closer I saw that they were doing exactly the same thing I had seen them do that previous day. What's more, even though I was on their side of the road, it looked like they could not see me. Glad of that, I sped off again.

The next day at work I mentioned all this to Sam. At first he thought I was kidding him, but when he saw I wasn't, Sam wanted to see for himself. I met up with him again after supper and drove him out to the bridge; we both thought that the time of day might be important.

Sure enough, there they were again, going through exactly the same motions as before. I slowed down to about one mile per hour, but I was not willing to come to a complete stop. After a couple of minutes, I sped back up, never to see them again. “Got it!” Sam said.

He had had the sense to take down the information from the car's tag. It took him two months, but Sam was eventually able to identify the “Italians.” They turned out to be an immigrant family of Hungarian gypsies. The tag was from 1955, and its owner was a widower who had two adult sons and a grown daughter. The older son was married, but his wife divorced him the next year.

Most surprising to me was the fact that they were all still alive, though the father was now nearly ninety. Well, almost all of them, anyway: I had some strong suspicions about the small thing that was thrown into the creek, but no way of knowing for sure.

EDIT:  Revisiting this old post, I'm not sure why I held back a few details.

1. I am pretty sure that the "small thing" thrown into the river was a dead baby, the result of either abortion or infanticide.  This would have been the child of the older son, and what happened at the bridge was the reason his wife left him.  The baby had been essentially a sacrifice in some sort of black magic ritual.
2. Although all the adults were "still living" ... well, that was only true in a biological sense.  Their souls were still stuck at the bridge, conducting the evil ritual over and over again. 
3. The creepy feeling had been because of points 1 and 2.